Herochu Automated Loading Arm Cantilever Handling Equipment
Servo Swing Arm Manipulator – 300 kg to 1 t Pick-and-Place in One Fluid Motion, CE & ISO 9001 Certified, From $19 300, Built for Your Press Brake, Laser or Shear
Stop watching operators wrestle a 2 × 4 m plate onto the table while the laser sits idle. Herochu’s servo-driven swing-arm loader turns a two-man, five-minute lift into a thirty-second solo gesture. The cantilevered beam glides horizontally 3 m, rises 1.85 m and swivels 210°—all on 600 W—then sets the sheet down within ±0.5 mm. One button, zero sweat, no hernia claims.
The arm ships as a flat-pack kit you can bolt together between shifts. Modular extrusions click in like giant Lego; if you re-line the shop next year, loosen eight M12 screws and the whole rig fits through a standard 1.6 m door. No crane, no welding, no fire-watch. Customers have gone from delivery to first pick in under three hours using only a socket wrench and the supplied laser-level.
Safety is cooked into the geometry. An optical ring guarded by Category-3 PL-e sensors stops the arm in 18 ms if a sleeve or shoelace strays into the sweep zone. Power-off brakes clamp the servo motor shaft the instant you hit the mushroom-head e-stop, so a 1 t load hangs where it is instead of drifting toward the operator’s shoulder. The pendant cable is curly and coiled, removing the trip hazard common on fixed consoles.
We build five standard models, but “standard” simply means fastest delivery. HC-R3015-500 handles 8 mm mild-steel plates up to 3 m × 1.5 m and 500 kg; step up to HC-R4020-1000 and you can feed 20 mm plate at 4 m × 2 m and one full metric ton. All frames share the same footprint—3.8 m × 1.7 m × 1.7 m—so you can start small and swap the cantilever module when your jobs grow. Suction arrays scale from fifteen 150 mm cups on the 300 kg version to eighteen 250 mm cups on the heavy-duty rig, giving you redundancy even if two pads lose vacuum.
Vacuum generation is electric-regenerative: a 24 V brushless pump recycles exhaust air to cool itself, cutting power draw by 35 % compared with venturi systems. A analog gauge on the beam glows green above −55 kPa and red below −45 kPa, removing guesswork. Lose power? An 8 L accumulator keeps the load attached for five minutes—long enough to set it down manually. No compressed-air line means no oily mist on laser lenses and no 6 bar leaks hissing all swing shift.
The servo package is a 17-bit absolute encoder married to a 5:1 harmonic drive. Repeatability is ±0.1 mm, good enough to slide a sheet into a 0.2 mm die clearance without edge shaving. Teach the arm once by guiding it through two corners; the control box records the path and replays it 250 000 times without drift. If you swap from 1.5 mm aluminum to 12 mm stainless, tap “Material” on the 4-inch color screen, enter thickness and density, and the controller auto-scales acceleration so a 300 kg sheet doesn’t overshoot like a frisbee.
Because the mast is cantilevered, the loader straddles your existing conveyor, press brake or fiber laser table instead of blocking access. Fork pockets are welded into the base so a pallet truck can relocate the whole unit between two machines during a tool change. That means one robot feeds both a 3 kW laser and a 320 t press, amortizing its cost across two processes instead of sitting idle while the brake cycles.
Maintenance is designed for earth-bound budgets. Grease nipples are grouped on the left cheek plate; one pump every 2 000 cycles keeps the slewing bearing alive for eight years. The servo motor is an off-the-shelf 400 W Delta unit—available on every continent for less than $280. Even the suction cups are DIN-spec; buy replacements from any pneumatics vendor instead of waiting for proprietary molds. We log mean-time-between-failure data from 1 200 arms in the field: current average is 14 700 hours, roughly six years of single-shift service.
CE conformity is not a sticker we bought online. The loader is Category-2 certified under EN ISO 10218-2, file number 22/2004.224.M. We also supply a complete technical construction file—risk assessment, FEM fatigue report, noise test (68 dB(A) at 1 m)—so your insurer and safety manager sign off in the same meeting. Need UL or CSA for North America? We build those variants with NEMA 12 enclosures and 480 V Y-delta motors at no extra lead time.
Color is whatever makes your aisle pop. Default is RAL 2004 signal orange for high visibility, but we’ve shipped forest-green for a furniture plant and stainless-steel-brushed for a clean-room OLED line. Your logo is laser-etched on the beam and repeated on the HMI splash screen so visiting auditors know exactly who invested in smart handling.
Price starts at $19 300 FOB Qingdao for the HC-R3015-500. A 40’ HQ takes six units, landing cost in Houston or Hamburg around $21 900 each—still below the average workers-comp claim for a torn rotator cuff. Lease financing is available through Siemens Financial at 6.9 % APR; payments on a five-year term are roughly $380 a month, less than one shift of overtime labor.
Ordering is three emails. Tell us the maximum sheet size, weight and the gap between your conveyor and laser table. We return a CAD overlay showing sweep envelope and recommended floor anchors. Approve the drawing, pay 30 % deposit, and the arm leaves the factory in 15 days. We pre-program the HMI with your parts library so the first teach cycle is literally one drag-and-drop on delivery morning.
The arm is not a science project; it is a shovel that moves profit closer to the machine. While your competitor’s operator wrestles a 20 mm plate for the fifth time, your guy presses green, sips coffee and watches the cycle start. We will send you a 3-D walk-through and a payback calculator that fits on one page.
Herochu—let the steel float, and let the people keep their shoulders.
